OPINION: Nigeria’s economy like US pig farms
The road from a pig farm in Iowa to the offices of economic development in Abuja is a long one. So, you need to saddle up for the ride.
That’s what happened when there was an outbreak of coronavirus among workers at meat-processing plants. One after the other, the plants shut down, and that brought the entire industry in the area to a halt. To arrest the situation, President Donald Trump declared meat-processing an essential service and ordered the plants to reopen. But that couldn’t happen at the snap of a finger. And even after they re-opened, it was a stretch trying to catch up with the backlog.
I don’t suppose any of us became a Dangote from the enterprise. But we might have if we could have carted away all the oranges to a processing plant. We could have turned them into orange juice that is preserved and marketed—perhaps internationally. Rather, while the bulk of the oranges rotted away, Nigeria was most likely importing orange juice.recently reported that as much as 45 per cent of Nigeria’s tomato produce goes to waste.
But Nigeria being what it is, who knows what might scuttle that goal? So far, petroleum and electric power productions have both defied all attempts to make supply reflect Nigeria’s abundance. “The three refinery sites in Africa’s largest oil exporter have worked only sporadically due to years of underinvestment,” Reuters states in reporting the announced closures. “It has been working to revamp them, but has struggled to find external financing to do so.”Meanwhile, as with tomato processing, Dangote has stepped into the refining breach. His mega-refinery in Lekki is projected to have a capacity of 650,000 bpd.
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